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Bliizzard dev: Diablo III "feels better" with gamepad

Diablo III game director Jay Wilson revealed that the development team experimented with using gamepads while playing the action-RPG, and made a statement that is sure to raise eyebrows: Wilson claims it worked better than a keyboard and mouse.

“We don’t see ourselves as a PC developer – we see ourselves as a game developer. It’s just that the games that we wanted to make suit the PC platform,” Wilson told PC Gamer in an interview. “We don’t believe you can make a Starcraft style RTS and make it Blizzard great on a console. We do believe you could make an RTS that would be on a console, but we would have (to have) that idea, and that spark and that passion to make it.

“One of the reasons why we’re exploring the idea of a console version of Diablo 3 because we feel that the controls and the style of the game lend itself to a console. With some of our early experiments in putting a direct control scheme into the game via a 360-like analogue controller, I’ve been ‘Oh this feels even better, with direct control…’”

Dungeon Siege III did work well with a controller, and there has been rumblings and hints dropped by Blizzard about bringing Diablo III to consoles. However, that doesn't mean their abandoning the mouse and keyboard as the primary control of Diablo III. “I can pretty much guarantee that if we decide to do a console version that we will look to support a pad on the PC,” says Wilson. “But initially with release I don’t think we’ll be ready.”

Diablo III is undergoing closed beta-testing and (hopefully) will be released sometime later this year.